A Muslim Brotherhood-led political coalition was forced to cancel a planned press conference on Tuesday after security forces stormed the venue where the event was due to take place.
The National Alliance to Support Legitimacy, which supports ousted Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi, was due to hold a conference at the headquarters of the Independence Party, an Islamist political grouping. The conference was to have provided a response to a newly issued report by the National Council for Human Rights on the circumstances that surrounded the dispersal of a pro-Mohamed Morsi protest camp last summer.
On 7 March, after the NCHR had released a summary of its report, the Muslim Brotherhood published a statement criticising the document as "full of fallacies, factual errors and flagrant lies."
“The report describes the incident as armed clashes between the protesters and the police, when in fact it was a one-sided war of extermination where the army and police killed thousands of unarmed, civilian peaceful protestors,” read the statement.
The final version of the NCHR report was released at a second press conference on Monday. The report critcises police violence but concludes that some armed protesters were the first to fire weapons during the dispersal.
According to the report, 632 people were killed during the dispersal, including eight policemen.
Egypt designated the Brotherhood a terrorist organisation in December 2013. Thousands of supporters have been arrested on a variety of charges related to membership of a terrorist organisation, illegal protesting, or violence and disorder.
The National Alliance in Support of Legitimacy was launched last July and includes the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, the centrist Al-Wasat Party, the Salafist Al-Watan Party, and the Building and Development Party of the ultra-conservative Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiya group.
The alliance also includes the Professional Syndicates Union, made up of 24 syndicates, and tribal coalitions from Sinai, Upper Egypt and the Mediterranean city of Marsa Matrouh.
